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Chapter Nine Chapter Nine Is There Immediate Justification? You have immediate justification for believing that p if, and only if, your justification for believing that p does not depend on any justification you have for believing some other proposition, q. James Pryor defends the claim that such justification exists. According to him, the best argument in its support is not the regress argument, according to which unacceptable alternatives – justification coming from an infinite regress of reasons, from a circular chain of reasons, or from initial beliefs that are not themselves justified – lend support to the conclusion that there must be immediate justification. Rather, Pryor argues, the best way to defend the existence of immediately justified beliefs is to cite examples of such beliefs, such as “I am tired” or “I have a headache.” Pryor provides additional support for immediate justification by criticizing what he calls the “Master Argument for Coherentism.” In his essay, Juan Comesaña raises a serious problem for the view that there are immediately justified beliefs. He argues that a view like Pryor’s is committed to four principles each of which is, by itself, exceedingly plausible. Unfortunately, the four principles are inconsistent. In response to Comesaña, Pryor singles out and rejects what Comesaña calls the Entailment Principle. Comesaña, in turn, defends the principle in his reply to Pryor. There Is Immediate Justification James Pryor 1 Justification I want to talk about a certain epistemic quality that I call “justification,” and inquire whether that quality can ever be had “immediately” or “non-inferentially.” Before we Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Second Edition. Edited by Matthias Steup, John Turri, and Ernest Sosa. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. get into substantive issues, we need first to agree about what epistemic quality it is we’ll be talking about, and then we need to clarify what it is to have that quality imme- diately or non-inferentially. When I say I call this epistemic quality “justification,” you are liable to think, “Oh I know what that is.” You may. But experience has taught me that different philosophers use and understand the term “justification” differently, even before they start spinning substantive theories about what “justification” amounts to. So we should proceed cautiously. You may use the term “justification” to describe the same epistemic quality as I do; or you may use it to describe some different status or quality. You may use some other term, or no term at all, to describe the quality I call “justification.” I say that you have justification to believe P iff you are in a position where it would be epistemically appropriate for you to believe P, a position where P is episte- mically likely for you to be true. I intend this to be a very inclusive epistemic status.1 Some philosophers say you can know P without “having any justification” for your belief. We can assume that whenever a subject knows P, she will be in a position where it would be epistemically appropriate to believe P. So on my usage, whoever knows P has justification to believe P. (Perhaps she has that justification because she knows.) The philosophers who say otherwise are using “having justification” to mean something different, or more specific, than the epistemic status I am using it to mean. The same goes for philosophers who say a belief can be epistemically appro- priate, and so play a role in justifying other beliefs, though you do not “have any justification” for it. On my usage, all it means to have justification to believe something is that it is appropriate for you to believe it, and to rely on that belief in forming other beliefs. Some philosophers call this epistemic status “entitlement” or “warrant,” rather than “justification.” For the sake of a shared discussion, though, we need to fix on a single terminology. If there is some state or condition you are in in virtue of which you have justifica- tion to believe P, I’ll call it a “justification-making condition,” or a justification maker for short. This is a condition that makes it epistemically appropriate (or more appro- priate) for you to believe P, rather than disbelieve P or suspend judgment. It is a truth maker for your having justification to believe P. (Firth, 1964, called these conditions “warrant-increasing properties.”) We can say that conditions of this sort justify you in believing P. They are justifiers. (We will encounter a different way to understand talk of “justifiers” in section 6 below.) In what follows, it will be useful for us to distinguish between having justification to believe P, and actually appropriately holding a belief in P. To have justification to believe P, it is not important whether you actually do believe P (nor, if you do, why you do); there just have to be things that make believing P an appropriate attitude for you to have. To appropriately believe P more is required. You need to believe P; you need to have justification to believe P; and you also need to believe P on the right grounds. You need to believe it for reasons that make you have justification to believe it; you can’t believe it for other, bad reasons, or on a whim.2 There are further conditions as well: for instance, you need to be taking proper account of any evidence you have that tells against or undercuts your grounds for believing P. I describe another further condition in Pryor (2004). Only when all such conditions are met will your belief in P be appropriately held. There Is Immediate Justification 203 2 Immediate Justification Now that we have a grip on the notion of “justification,” let’s clarify what it means to talk about “immediate justification.” For some propositions, you have justification to believe them because other propositions you have justification to believe epistemically support them. For instance, suppose you look at the gas gauge of your car, and it appears to read “E.” So you have justification to believe: (Gauge) The gas gauge reads “E.” That, together with other things you justifiedly believe about your car, gives you justification to believe: (Gas) Your car is out of gas. (It is not important for our purposes whether you actually do believe (Gauge) or (Gas). Given your evidence, you ought to believe them.) In this example, your justi- fication to believe (Gas) comes in part from the fact that you have justification to believe (Gauge). That is, having justification to believe the latter is part of what makes you have justification to believe the former. The justification you have in this example to believe (Gauge) does not in the same way come from your having justification to believe (Gas). (One mark of this is that evidence that undercut your justification to believe (Gauge) would ipso facto undercut your justification to believe (Gas); but not vice versa.) When your justification to believe P comes in part from your having justification to believe other, supporting propositions, I will say that those latter propositions mediate your justification to believe P. (This kind of justification is sometimes called “inferential” justification. We will encounter a second way in which justification can be “inferential” later.) When your justification to believe P does not come from your justification to believe other propositions, I will call it immediate. Some clarifications.3 First, the question whether your justification to believe P is mediate or immediate is a question about what kind of epistemic support you have for P. It is not a question about how much support you have: nothing in our definition requires immediately justified beliefs to be infallible or indefeasible. Nor is it a question about what psychological processes you have undergone. The support you have to believe P can be mediate (or “inferential”) even if you didn’t arrive at P by deriving or inferring it from other beliefs. Second, in order for you to have immediate justification to believe P, it is not required that your justification comes from nowhere, that there is nothing that makes you so justi- fied. It is only required that what makes you justified doesn’t include having justification for other beliefs.4 There are various proposals about what can make one have immediate justification. For example, perhaps you are immediately justified in believing you feel tired because you do feel tired. Perhaps you are immediately justified in believing that tiredness is a mental state because you understand what tiredness is. And so on. It may be 204 James Pryor that there is no single correct account. Different propositions may be justified by different kinds of things. Third, the fact that you have immediate justification to believe P does not entail that no other beliefs are required for you to be able to form or entertain the belief that P. Having the concepts involved in the belief that P may require believing certain other propositions; it does not follow that any justification you have to believe P must be mediated by those other propositions.5 Fourth, justification is usually defeasible. What a justification maker for P gives you is provisional or prima facie justification to believe P; and that is what I am saying can be mediate or immediate. Whether it is all things considered appropriate for you to believe P will depend on what other evidence you possess, and whether it defeats the prima facie justification you have to believe P. Fifth, beliefs can be epistemically overdetermined. You can have immediate justifi- cation and independent mediate justification to believe the same thing.
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